Enemy of the Week

Everyone’s still talking about Tuesday’s State of the Union Show, but what about the state of those who attended the State of the Union and made up what’s known in the business as the live audience? We were frankly alarmed by what we saw. Let’s just say there were many in the crowd who just don’t seem to be getting older and healthier.

For starters, Joe Biden looked gaunt. Has the president’s pet veep not been eating? When last spotted that night he was wet-eyed, brushing away tears. This was after the evening’s main speaker said Joe would be in charge of new job-retraining efforts in partnership with our community colleges. There he is, wanting to run for president, and he’s been told to go back to junior college. You would cry too if it happened to you.

Then we noticed Harry Reid, and let’s just say he displayed none of Dick Durbin’s ebullience. He appeared pained. What is going on? He never smiles these days. The pressure of being Harry Reid is destroying him.

Republicans learned something this week: Payback is always in the cards if they win when they’re not supposed to. Flash backward to 2009 and the odd-year election states of New Jersey and Virginia, where two insurgent candidacies took the first steps in the long recovery from the disastrous defeats of 2008. For a good while everyone was giddy over Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell’s gubernatorial wins, especially given how each initially performed, regardless of their contrasting personalities. The rest is history, alas, a lot of it hysteria, and now we’re left combing through the wreckage, a lot of it covered by cold deep snow. It’s like the withdrawal-from-Russia scenes in War and Peace.

First came Gov. Christie’s second inauguration in Trenton, where no one ever has to wait in a toll booth line. There was no after-party (sigh). The planned inauguration bash on Ellis Island, within intimate view of the Statue of Liberty, had to be canceled. The governor’s huddled mass wasn’t welcomed. His handlers were quick to blame the snub on Mother Nature, not Lady Liberty.

Long past having anyone to turn to for inspiration, our president unwittingly channeled Jim Croce, though naturally without any of the late singer’s poetic components and melodic grace. “Like the singing bird and the croaking toad, I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name,” Croce once sang, before adding, “And I carry it with me like my daddy did.” Our president, dispensing with any introduction, countered with, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” before adding, “And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.” Guess that mixed metaphor kept him from telling us what his daddy did. To be fair, it’s likely pops played soccer.

We know it was too good to be true. As he explained in his Checkers speech yesterday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has no idea who Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich is. So much for a Republican playing hard ball with a Democrat. We’re back to the basic model, in which your typical Republican honcho can’t even get Republicans to back him. It’s also probably safe to assume Christie doesn’t know the difference between a Serb and a Croat either. He is after all a Springsteen, not a Bob Dylan, fan.

Incidentally, which of those last two will be the first to compose “The Ballad of Fort Lee”? A city heretofore famous only thanks to Gilda Radner whose captives’ lone escape is via the George Washington Bridge — and who know how long it will remain standing if Gov. Christie ever comes to that bridge and crosses it? Bridgegate is going to be multi-spanned.

We were going to give you a rundown of the best and worst of the best and worst lists of 2013 but then thought better of it. Who still remembers 2013? Or in any case dares or cares to remember? Certainly not our grand winner for 2013, the certified native Hawaiian who continues to list 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as his permanent address, even though he does little golfing there, not even any putting around, so far as NSA surveillance has determined or Edward Snowden has divulged.

Even worse, he’s living proof that the more the years change, the more he stays the same. Consider the photographs we’ve seen of him from his Hawaiian Holiday vacation. Notice anything peculiar? Yes, they all show him doing the one thing he does, golfing. And on top of that he continues to wear those same funny shorts, the ones that make him look like a bona fide member of the LPGA. Could his obsessive exercise of executive power derive from a commensurate lack of leg power?

We all know who he is, he knows damn well we know, at some level he actually agrees. Self-pity is the only thing he still has going for him. He’s managed to deprive the U.S. even of this last bit of suspense. His one expressed hope is that we will honor precedent and defer our call until after the 2014 elections, as if that would change anything. As he sees it, if he repeats as Enemy of the Year a year from now, it at least won’t be recorded as a twofer. Always a doggedly slow learner, he’s begun to appreciate the false allure of re-election success.

Ladies and gentlepersons, let the Games begin! Always good to get off to an early start, since there might not be snow in tropical Russia when the latest winter Olympiad officially opens there on February 7. And what ice there should be is already melting away in the heated competition currently underway between the world’s top two performers. Let it be said. Joanie loved Chachi, but President Obama doesn’t love Sochi. Not the way President Putin does. So they’ve been hurling javelins at each other.

Obama, you rascal! Who knew? And he recruited his catch with no help from any state trooper, even with Bill Clinton nearby. And to think he did it all right in front of the missus. Certainly a cowering Bill never tried anything funny if Madam Hillary was in the vicinity.

The rest of it was rather predictable. From David Maraniss’s biography we knew that pre-Michelle the Lothario liked his girlfriends to be composites. One look at the dirty flirty Danish PM and you have the spitting image mix of Cameron Diaz and Laura Linney. Mrs. O won’t forgive us this, but we must say Mr. O has a good taste in composites. The only mystery is what the ever weird David Cameron was thinking trying to make it a threesome. Those British Tories, at least less of the male variety, seem forever ripe for Scandal. Must be what comes from the lack of school choice in British public schools, regardless of when they were chartered.

OK, so last week we were on our best behavior, sitting Thanksgiving out and allowing the nation’s turkeys the run of the land. Our Leader the President took advantage of our good-will truce to spare the lives of the constitutionally dubious National Turkeys, whose names were released as Mr. Popcorn and Ms. Caramel and the former was granted a joint appearance with his savior and master, the aforementioned President. When last seen, the two Turks were living as squatters at Mount Vernon, the one-time plantation of our nation’s founding president. It’s not clear if they’re being paid a living wage.

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